Chromosome region recognition with local band patterns

To make the visual examination of a chromosome image for various chromosome abnormalities, individual chromosome regions have to be extracted from the subject image and classified into the distinct chromosome types. To improve the accuracy and flexibility in this process, we propose a subregion (local band pattern) based method for recognizing chromosome regions in the image. This method regards each chromosome region as a series of subregions, and iterates a search for subregions in the image consecutively. Consequently, chromosome region classification is performed simultaneously with its extraction for each subregion. Since the dimensions and intensities of chromosome regions vary with every image, effective subregion searches require templates whose dimensions and intensities correspond with those of chromosome regions in the image. To develop an effective subregion search, we also propose a method for adjusting the dimensions of templates to those of chromosome regions in the image and adapting the intensities in the image to those of the templates.